Around the world, stakeholders, including individuals and entities, both private and public, are increasingly relying on computer networks to exchange information and to carryout transactions. Many of these stakeholders are finding it essential to maintain fast, reliable and secure communications over computer networks. The importance of maintaining fast, reliable and secure communications increases drastically where a stakeholder has facilities located in different geographic locations that must routinely communicate with each other over open networks, such as, for example, the Internet.
One approach taken by some stakeholders has been to use leased lines to maintain a wide area network (WAN). The leased lines have included, for example, integrated services digital networks (ISDN) or Optical Carrier-3 lines (OC3) provided by telephone companies. However, the stakeholders have realized that maintaining communication over leased lines can become very expensive.
Many stakeholders have created intranets and/or virtual private networks (VPNs) to maintain communication amongst their computers that are located at different geographic locations. The popularity of virtual private networks has been growing at a rapid rate since VPNs allow stakeholders to cost-efficiently communicate between computers located at considerable distances from each other over connections routed through, for example, the Internet.
Since computer security is an increasingly important consideration, due in large part to the proliferation of networks and, in particular, the Internet, and because computers are evermore increasingly connected to each other, thereby increasing a risk to any one of the computers being attacked and information being misappropriated from the computer, a reliable, efficient and secure network access control system is needed to provide for fast, reliable and secure communications over computer networks.